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Monday, March 21, 2016

I've taken to making fatty "jerky" in the dehydrator from thinly sliced chuck steaks they sell at my local grocery store.

It looks like this:

It absolutely melts in the mouth as it is, though, believe it or not, I sometimes spread butter on it.

My local store also sells thinly sliced ribeye.
This I consider a crime.
There is no way to cook it to rare like that.

Yesterday, however, I was looking for the thinly sliced chuck and they had none.
What they did have was thinly sliced ribeye, marked down for no apparent reason.
I realised that it cost only slightly more than what I pay for the chuck,
and a beautiful idea formed in my mind...

Here are some photos of the succulent result:

It's definitely not the best ribeye I've had, but it's easily the best jerky.

What is it called when a carnivore doesn't eat meat?

Shortly after that
I was
chatting with a friend about it.
I said that I don't fast on a schedule,
but that I often eat only one meal a day (most often two meals).
I did mention that I've long thought it would be fun to fast once a week for a whole day —
that would be more than 24 hours, since I don't eat during the night.

So for the first two Mondays in March, I did just that.
(That is, I ate no meat. I did drink my usual coffee, and I had a few spoons of tallow in the afternoon when my energy was dipping.)
In practice the first fast was 48 hours, and the second more like 42.
I enjoyed it.

Under a fat-based metabolism, one doesn't normally feel hungry throughout the day.
The liver takes care of glucose and all that,
much better than for those on a glycolytic diet.
So I wasn't hungry.

I lost a few pounds, and was down to my lowest weight in decades.
I know from experience that weight loss from short term fasting is often transient,
so I wasn't really worried about it, or counting on it staying off, but it was still fun.

This past week, however, I have been ravenous.
My policy is always to feed my body when it's hungry.
Fighting hunger is a losing battle.
If you're hungry, there's a hormonal reason.
It's a signal.
You can't change it simply by not eating (except insofar as not eating changes your hormonal state).
This is counterproductive.
You have to change the signal.

Anyway, today I intended to fast again, but I was hungry and the tallow didn't help and by the time I got home I was ready to eat.
So I did.
Besides, I had ribeye jerky waiting for me.